Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
said, “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhab-
ited by some 70 million hungry people,”
9
and in 1974 he wrote, “America's economic joyride is coming
to an end: there will be no more cheap, abundant energy, no more cheap abundant food.”
10
Another catastrophic prediction we hear today is that pollution from fossil fuels will make our environ-
ment more and more hazardous to our health—hence we need to stop using “dirty” fossil fuels. This pre-
diction was also made many times in the 1970s—with many assurances that these predictions were backed
by the best science.
Life
magazine reported in January 1970 that, because of particles emitted in the air by burning fossil
fuels,“Scientistshavesolidexperimentalandtheoreticalevidencetosupport . . .thefollowingpredictions:
In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . . by 1985 air pollution
will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . .”
11
To quote Paul Ehrlich again, as
he may have been the most influential public intellectual of the decade (and is still a prestigious professor
of ecology at Stanford University): “Air pollution . . . is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of
lives in the next few years alone,” he said in 1970.
12
Andthenthere'sthepredictionwehearmosttoday:thesupposedlyscientifically indisputableclaimthat
CO
2
emissions from fossil fuels will cause a true climate catastrophe within a couple of decades.
13
Read-
ing back in time, I saw that many of the leaders who make that prediction now had, decades ago, predicted
that we'd be living in catastrophe
today
.
Here's a 1986 news story about a prediction by James Hansen, the most influential climate scientist in
the world over the last thirty years:
Dr. James E. Hansen of the Goddard Space Flight Center's Institute for Space Studies said research
by his institute showed that because of the “greenhouse effect” that results when gases prevent heat
from escaping the earth's atmosphere, global temperatures would rise early in the next century to “well
above any level experienced in the past 100,000 years.”
Average global temperatures would rise by one-half a degree to one degree Fahrenheit from 1990 to
2000 if current trends are unchanged, according to Dr. Hansen's findings. Dr. Hansen said the global
temperature would rise by another 2 to 4 degrees in the following decade.
14
Bill McKibben, when he told Duke students in 2012 that we were on the verge of drastic warming,
neglected to mention the results of his decades-old claims, such as this one in 1989: “The choice of doing
nothing—of continuing to burn ever more oil and coal—is not a choice, in other words. It will lead us, if
not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature”; and “a few more decades of un-
governed fossil-fuel use and we burn up, to put it bluntly.”
15
John Holdren, a protégé of Paul Ehrlich who serves as science adviser to President Barack Obama, had
a particularly dire prediction, according to Ehrlich in 1986: “As University of California physicist John
Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion
people before the year 2020.”
16
Just as the media today tell us these catastrophic predictions are a matter of scientific consensus, so
did the media of the 1980s. For example, on the issue of catastrophic climate change: “By early 1989 the
popular media were declaring that 'all scientists' agreed that warming was real and catastrophic in its po-
tential,” a 1992 study reported.
17
Ifall the predicted catastrophes—depletion, pollution, climate change—had occurred asthought leaders
said they would, the world of today would be much, much worse than the world of the 1970s. In the 1970s,
